Open Access in the Developing Regions: Situating the Altercations About Predatory Publishing / L’accès libre dans les régions en voie de développement : Situation de la controverse concernant les pratiques d’édition déloyales W.E. Nwagwu Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science, Volume 40, Number 1, March / mars 2016, pp. 58-80 (Article) Published by University of Toronto Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/611577 [ Access provided at 26 Sep 2021 00:52 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] Errata The article by Williams Nwagwu in the last issue of CJILS/RCSIB (Nwagwu, Williams. 2016. ‘‘Open access in the developing regions: situating the alterca- tions about predatory publishing.’’ Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science/Revue canadienne des sciences de l’information et de bibliothe´conomie. 40(1): 58–80), contained the following errors and omissions: Page 64, Paragraph 3: Attribution error. The paper first submitted and accepted to the journal, Science in December, 2010 was misattributed to Michael Eisen (2013). The original paper (Wolfe-Simon, Felisa, et al. 2011. ‘‘A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.’’ Science. 332(6034): 1163-1166), can be found at: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163. Pages 64–65: Citation error. This paragraph should have been attributed to Nwagwu and Onyancha (2015). Full Citation: Nwagwu, Williams and Bosire Onyancha. 2015. Back to the beginning – the journal is dead, long live science.’’ The Journal of Academic Librarianship. 41(5): 669–679. Tables 2, 3, and 4: Citation error. These tables should have been attributed to O. Ojemini (2015). Both the author and CJILS/RCSIB regret the errors. L’article par Williams Nwagwu dans le dernier nume´ro de la RCSIB/CJILS (Nwagwu, Williams. 2016. ‘‘Open access in the developing regions: situating the altercations about predatory publishing.’’ Revue canadienne des sciences de l’information et de bibliothe´conomie/Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science. 40(1): 58–80), contenait les erreurs et omissions suivantes : Page 64, paragraphe 3 : Erreur d’attribution. L’article soumis a` la revue Science et accepte´ en de´cembre 2010 a e´te´ mal attribue´ a` Michael Eisen (2013). L’article original (Wolfe-Simon, Felisa, et al. 2011. ‘‘A bacterium that can grow by using arsenic instead of phosphorus.’’ Science. 332(6034): 1163-1166) se trouve a` : http://science. sciencemag.org/content/332/6034/1163. Pages 64-65 : Erreur de citation. Ce paragraphe aurait duˆ eˆtre attribue´ a` Nwagwu et Onyancha (2015). Citation comple`te : Nwagwu, Williams and Bosire Onyancha. 2015. Back to the beginning – the journal is dead, long live science.’’ The Journal of Academic Librarianship. 41(5): 669–679. Tables 2, 3 et 4 : Erreur de citation. Ces tableaux auraient duˆ eˆtre attribue´sa` O. Ojemini (2015). Les deux auteurs et la RCSIB/CJILS regrettent ces erreurs. 8 2016 The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science La Revue canadienne des sciences de l’information et de bibliothe´conomie 40, no. 2 2016 Open Access in the L’acce`s libre dans les Developing Regions: re´gions en voie de Situating the Altercations de´veloppement : Situa- About Predatory tion de la controverse Publishing concernant les pratiques d’e´dition de´loyales W.E. Nwagwu Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa Department of Information Science, University of South Africa Email: [email protected] Abstract: A notable event in the current revolution of the World Wide Web is the open access model of publishing, which promotes freedom of inquiry and full and open availability of scientific information on a global scale. The promise of open access to replace existing scientific information dissemination practices and ethos has been contentious, with the interests of different stakeholders—countries, publishers, and open access activists, among others, clashing on an unprecedented scale. With special reference to the emergence of predatory journals, this article examines some of the challenges that have been triggered by the open access movement. Basically, open access is technology heavy, and its economic arrangements benefit mainly the developed world. There exists evidence of open access initiatives in the Africa region, but these initiatives are mainly individually based and are largely under- developed and sometimes predatory. The author argues that what is required now is a regional open access policy that spells out how the issues of right and cost, and others, will be viewed and addressed in the region to ensure that the benefits of open access do not bypass Africa. Keywords: Africa, developing countries, open access, predatory publishing, scholarly publishing Re´sume´ :Une´ve´nement notable dans la re´volution actuelle du web est le mode`le du libre acce`s dans le domaine de l’e´dition, qui favorise la liberte´ de la recherche et la disponibilite´ pleine et entie`re de l’information scientifique a` l’e´chelle mondiale. La promesse du libre acce`s de remplacer les pratiques existantes et la philosophie de diffusion de l’information scientifique a fait l’objet de controverses, les inte´reˆts des diffe´rentes parties prenantes—pays, e´diteurs, militants du libre acce`s, entre autres, s’affrontant sur une e´chelle sans pre´ce´dent. Faisant re´fe´rence particulie`rement a` l’e´mergence de revues aux pratiques de´loyales, le pre´sent article examine certains des de´fis qui ont e´te´ de´clenche´s par le mouvement du libre acce`s. Fondamentale- ment, le libre acce`s implique une forte composante technologique et ses arrange- ments e´conomiques profitent essentiellement au monde de´veloppe´. Il existe des preuves d’initiatives de libre acce`s en Afrique, mais ces initiatives sont essentielle- ment des initiatives individuelles, ge´ne´ralement sous-de´veloppe´es, et recourant 8 2016 The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science La Revue canadienne des sciences de l’information et de bibliothe´conomie 40, no. 1 2016 Open Access in the Developing Regions 59 parfois a` des pratiques de´loyales. L’auteur fait valoir que ce qui est ne´cessaire maintenant est une politique de libre acce`sre´gionale pre´cisant la fac¸on dont les questions de droit et de couˆt, parmi d’autres, doivent eˆtre conc¸ues et aborde´es dans cette re´gion afin de s’assurer que l’Afrique ne soit pas exclue des avantages du libre acce`s. Mots-cle´s : Afrique, pays en voie de de´veloppement, libre acce`s, pratiques de´loyales d’e´dition, e´dition scientifique Introduction The expansion of electronic technologies in the 1990s is, without doubt, a great milestone in global scientific information production and dissemination practices and ethos. A notable development is the birth of the open access movement, which challenges and promises to replace the traditional scientific information dissemination methodologies with electronic alternatives (Harnad 2008; Laakso and Bjo¨rk 2012; Lewis 2012; Suber 2012a, 2012b). Despite the avowed benefits of global free flow of scientific information, the movement has also generated some conflicts. These conflicts may be reflecting the variation in the social and technological statuses of human communities as well as the way in which these communities are deploying their resources to participate in the open access movement. A typical case in point is the predatory publishing phenomenon that is credited to Jeffery Beall, a librarian at Auraria Library at the University of Colorado Denver in the United States in 2009. Beall has ever since maintained a regularly updated list of ‘‘potential, possible, or probable predatory scholarly open-access journals’’ on his website.1 However, there is some evidence to suggest that the phenomenon is distorting the participation of developing countries in the open access movement. For instance, despite Beall’s list being self-curated, not following any known scientific standard, and also being tentative in its description of the journals and their publishers (as potential, possible, or probable), the list has become widely accepted as a source for identifying fake and substandard journals in the world (Butler 2013; see also Beall’s interview with Wilson 2013). At the last count in August 2012, Beall had already identified 136 preda- tory publishing houses, with close to 1,400 journals. According to Beall, these journals are readily available, and they accept and are likely to publish all papers submitted to them, so long as the authors are willing to pay. The editorial quality of the papers is often very poor, while the content is not valid or not validated. In addition, the pedigrees of the journals, and the identity of their proprietors, are often unknown. There is no archiving practice leading to lack of access to their back numbers, and there is doubt about the veracity of their locations (Beall 2013a). This article interrogates the emergence of predatory publishing from within local social, political, and technical realities in the developing regions as well as in the wider global science community. The article also examines how deep the journals have penetrated the global science community only as an index of their use and acceptance, and not quality. 60 CJILS / RCSIB 40, no. 1 2016 Methodologically, this article is an opinion type, with strong empirical evi- dence to support the arguments. For the opinions, it adopts the approach of synthesizing, inferring, and interpreting published documents on science commu- nication and open access, intermixed with personal observations and experiences. For the empirical support, we drew data from medical open access journals published by two publishers, namely Academic Journals and International Re- search Journals of Nigeria, which are both listed in Beall’s list of predatory open access publishers in 2012. We retrieved the journals from their websites and extracted data about the countries of origin of the authors of the papers in the journals from the publishers’ websites and used the Publish or Perish soft- ware to gauge their citations from Google Scholar.